Such cooker-extruders are known (see for eg. EP 0 221 918 B1).
General descriptions about cooker-extruders can be found, among others, in Judson M Harper "Extrusion of Foods" 1981 CRC Press, Inc. Boca Raton, Fla., USA, as well as Mercier, Linko, Harper "Extrusion-Cooking" 1989 American Association of Cereal Chemists, Inc. St. Paul, Minn., USA.
The requirements as to a cooker-extruder for biopolymers may be summarised as follows:
High throughput capacity combined with high product quality, which is determined by constant process conditions, good homogenising (mixing, defined temperature creation, good formability of the dough as well as low investment costs, low maintenance cost and flexible process design and finally good controllability at fast reaction times and simple handling, especially, during starting of operation, dismounting and cleaning.
As compared to double screw extruders, single screw extruders have significant advantages, as also presented here, since the former are complicated in construction, require significantly more wear parts and hence contribute to higher maintenance costs.
On the other hand one attributes lower flexibility to the single screw machines and especially one criticises the often nonreproducibility of the temperature conditions and bad mixing-effect/homogenising.